grrlTravels

eat

Trying to eat "right" is like trying to learn archery in a tiny sailboat in the middle of a hurricane. With a tsunami approaching. In the dark. Well, tell me I'm wrong.

I grew up with a very 50s dinnertime mentality—we ate dinner at exactly 5:30 every night, and we had meat, one vegetable, and a starch. Cookies from a box for dessert. The starch was usually the highlight, occasionally the meat, never the vegetable. Poor sickly boiled vegetables tossed with some salt and indifference.

At some point during high school or college I got my hands on a copy of the Silver Palate Cookbook and attempted to feed leeks to my father one night for dinner. The leeks were not well received. I also tried cooking with fresh garlic, herbs, and lemon juice while reducing the amount of salt. Also not well received. Thing was, I was in love with the SPC. It seemed so...progressive and shocking and delicious.

The SPC cookbook had a 25th anniversary edition released, so I've been working on this food thing for at least 20 years. Thing is, even if you spend 20 years trying to get a handle on your eating or your thoughts and feelings about food it's still such a mess. Eggs are healthy, no they aren't, they're too high in cholesterol, no, just eat the whites and leave the yolks, but hey wait a minute the yolks are filled with all kinds of good-for-you compounds, eggs are healthy. As long as they're irradiated. Or not. And that's E-G-G-s. How about potatoes, pork, milk, any red meat, sugar, sugar substitutes, sugar sources, or soy. And that's not even scratching the surface of the weird diet du jour, low carb, macrobiotics, the raw food movement, Paleo diet, and calorie restriction, just to name a few. Oh, and McDonalds.

Right. For a science-y perfectionist like myself this is pretty much just torture. I'm a firm believer in moderation in everything yet I find myself in a shame spiral every time I even think about giving my kids fast food. Ditto Kraft macaroni and cheese. (See? I just lost half of you.) Ditto anything not organic, with HFCS or bleached flour, most white foods (fish and cauliflower being notable exceptions), anything with preservatives, anything from Monsanto, anything with synthetic anything. I sort of wish that I could scrap all of that stuff and the rest of the things on my very long list and still live the somewhat regular life I live now, but I don't think it's possible, and I know it's completely impossible when one lives in a small house on a tiny, tree covered lot with no room for chickens or a sustaining vegetable garden much less a herd of milk producing beasts.

I am trying desperately to find some middle ground which makes sense to me and allows me to believe that I am not unknowingly poisoning my kids or kicking their latent cancer genes/cells into high gear or causing them to grow starfish-like extra limbs. I'm finding that middle ground pretty darn elusive, and honestly even just writing "Monsanto" makes me want to sit down and cry. I love the locavore movement but I'm not wealthy enough to be one. I joined a local CSA and have been searching for a *good* farmer's market with interesting locally grown goodness. It's all so frustrating.

Eating. So simple and yet so complicated.

More to come on the changes I've made, the things I still very much want to change, and of course my angst about it all.

Posted by grrlTravels at May 26, 2010 7:43 PM